Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Researchers Seek Advanced Network Prioritization, Security Technology

Researchers are looking to build self-configuring network technology that would identifying traffic, let the network infrastructure prioritize it down to the end user, reallocate bandwidth between users or classes of users, and automatically make quality of service decisions. The system will have a minimum of 32 levels of prioritization. These prioritization levels will be configurable and changeable at the system level in an authenticated method. Data with a higher priority will be handled more expeditiously than traffic with a lower priority.

If that sounds like a major undertaking, it is, but consider who wants to develop such a beast: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

This advanced prioritization system is part of DARPA's Military Networking Protocol (MNP) program which is looking to develop an authenticated and attributable identification system for packet based, military and government data networks, the agency said. Military or government data sent with the MNP will be compatible with normal Internet equipment to allow MNP traffic to pass through legacy network or encryption equipment, DARPA said.

Not only should the prioritization scheme be radically advanced, the system should be extremely difficult to spoof or inject false traffic into, DARPA said.